Pentecostals put intensive study into bodies, texts, practices, and their interrelationships so as to effectively cultivate a sensory culture—sensorium—and invite authoritative religious experience. This ethnographic study follows a Pentecostal sensorium from its crucial institutionalization in early Assemblies of God practice to more contemporary manifestations at Bethany University and among the Promise Keepers. It traces the historical mutations of what I call the body logics—or portable sensory dynamics—that are central to Pentecostal pedagogies of conversion and commitment, especially in their relatively easy transposition to new contexts and ambivalent but productive relationship to modern secularity. Further, it argues that religiously inflected sensory aptitudes, and perhaps even mind–body dynamics, emerge through a process of careful cultivation and nurturance.

Exploring missionary study at an Assemblies of God Bible college through ethnography and training manuals demonstrates systematic pedagogies that cultivate sensory capabilities encouraging yielding, opening to rupture, and constraint. Ritual theory and the Anthropology of Christianity shift analytic scales to include "cultivation," a "third term" enabling simultaneous apprehension and consolidating of the oppositions (experience-doctrine, revival-church, or spontaneous rupture-restrained continuity) internal and central to Pentecostalism. Further, cultivation complicates valorizations of the disjunctive "event" as militant radical icon. [Pentecostalism, Christianity, sensorium, cultivation, pedagogy] The Nudge: Reed's StoryHere is the spooky part . . . 5 am, driving with the missions team to the airport-4 team members, me and my wife. Get a call, flights are cancelled, we pray and are booked on a better flight. First obstacle fixed. Halfway through the jetway I get yelled at. "Come back. We don't have you on this flight." The rest of team is already on. I tell 'em we are a team, we will meet in a little town in Romania and I need to be with them, I've never done this before. The guy at the counter looks up. He says "Trust me." Then [two more times] "Trust me." Well, he books us up to first class. I am a big guy, not so comfortable in small seats. Now, I am giddy but looking around, nobody is smiling-where is all the comfort and happiness? I open up to thanking God for getting me there in comfort to do his work.[In a Romanian church] Something tells me to lay my hand on this little lady. It is a cold snowy day, even in church we are wearing jackets. I am praying with my hand over her. It is like something pours oil from the top of my head and my whole body warms up from the top down. Not to the sweat but just a warm feeling. The pastor is speaking in tongues. Romanians around me are speaking in tongues. I had heard it before but never had it interpreted or understood it. Then there was a clarity. To me they were speaking plain English, the Romanian over here was speaking plain English. I was like, "whoah that's bizarre."The lady turns around and just openly starts weeping. I'm like, "great what have I done now? Who have I offended?" Well come to find out, she is speaking of a vision that she has had for the past six months. Dreaming of someone with my face, my build. You know, big guy, goatee, bald, the whole thing. She even drew pictures, and the pictures looked like me. I have a sword in one hand and with the other I am pulling young people up into heaven. It was a powerful thing but I still have the hesitancy, the skepticism. "OK who is the weird Romanian lady speaking this stuff to me." I go to the pastor who organized the conference. "Do you know her? Does she speak prophecies a lot?" He says yeah, shuffles some papers around. Has this quizzical look about him. "She is usually right. What did she say?" That's when it kind of hit me full force.The shock of the tongues and then the prophecy was like domino eff...

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This paper offers a critique of affect theory using the analytical concept of scale that is made concrete through an ethnography of Pentecostal Christianity and an exploration of current neuroscientific thinking. Affect theory is one recent form of a Western philosophical concern about the loss of agency in modernity, what I call “agency-anxiety.” Affect theorists tend to privilege the sense of freedom gained by immediate and individual experience over the constraints of more extended experiences and collectivity. That is, affect theory often scales its analysis tightly. This paper responds with an ethnography of Pentecostal practice and exploration of work in neuroscience that describes an analytic space in which broader scales can be useful as well. Ethnography scaled beyond the instant reveals that the Pentecostal ideal of surrendering to God in a moment of abandonment often results from a “fake it until you make it” approach; in other words, from extended, effortful, willful practice. This practice leads to the formation of habits and dispositions that allow the attainment of spontaneous rupture. Likewise, neuroscience can scale out its analysis by focusing on dispositions, moods and habits, rather than simply a more immediate view. Further, “scale effects” and emergent properties in scale-to-scale relations undermine reductionism. Finally, because Pentecostals are generally right wing yet also exemplify ruptural practice, it seems that outside of a particular conjuncture, the tightly scaled eruptive moment of affect is by no means per se a productive or (politically) progressive formation. As such, making scale an explicit analytical category might help us to see agency, change, and structure more clearly.

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